Trump 2.0, with fewer - if any - checks and balances
English original of article published this morning in Italian by La Stampa. Updates are in bold in square brackets
We now know that the opinion polling was wrong in the same way as in 2016 and 2020, and not like in 2022: the polls again underestimated Donald Trump’s support. But we now also must face the reality: that in a freely democratic election American voters have chosen to elect a man who four years ago attempted to subvert the results of the election with violence, and who will enter the White House on January 20th facing fewer constraints than he did in 2017.
The biggest difference between 2025 and 2017, beyond his own greater experience and preparedness, is that the Supreme Court now features a clear conservative majority thanks to his own appointments during his previous term, and that that court has recently ruled that the president enjoys immunity from prosecution for anything he does in his official capacity. That scope of that official capacity has yet to be defined by any court, as it needs to be, but we can be sure that Trump will seek to pre-empt such a definition through his own actions.
The main means by which he will do this is by placing loyalists in charge of the Department of Justice. In his first term, Trump was frequently frustrated by his Attorney Generals telling him that what he wanted to do was against the law. Using his official immunity, he will now feel emboldened to overrule any such niceties.
As Trump has always been a vengeful man, he can now be expected to seek revenge against his political and legal enemies, certainly including those who have sought to prosecute him but possibly also including President Joe Biden himself – although the immunity protection also applies to anything Biden has done in his own official capacity.
Many of his opponents, including Republican critics such as former congresswoman Liz Cheney, will now be preparing for a legal onslaught. Lots of his supporters, including those who were prosecuted for the assault on Capitol Hill on January 6th 2021, can soon expect to receive presidential pardons, giving an official endorsement of acts previously considered criminal and anti-democratic.
There will still be some constraints on the newly elected Trump. In 2017, he entered office with his Republican Party in control of both the Senate and the House of Representatives. This time the Republicans have taken control of the Senate, but it remains unclear whether the Democrats may take control of the House of Representatives [though as of today, November 7th, it looks unlikely that they will]. If they do end up with control], this would at least provide them with some means by which to control his spending and tax plans, for budgetary powers reside in the Congress. {If they don’t, then during the two years until the 2026 mid-term elections, the Republicans will have a pretty free hand, constrained only by reality and the financial markets.}
Notwithstanding this Congressional question, it is virtually certain that he will go ahead swiftly with a policy that will hurt Europe [and Japan], namely his plan to impose either a 10% or 20% tariff on all goods imported into the United States. A president can do this under several emergency powers, without needing Congressional approval. The current US average import tariff is just 2%, so this will be a huge increase, one which the European Commission [and the Japanese government, among others,] will likely retaliate against.
Trump has been a devotee of tariffs for many years, and in this campaign chose to emphasise how much he loves them, both as a means of raising revenue and as a way to punish countries that run surpluses on their trade with the United States. That category includes the European Union and Japan.
Some optimists believe that in this international economic policy Trump will be constrained by the many billionaire businessmen who supported his campaign, including Stephen Schwarzman of the huge Blackstone investment firm and Elon Musk. Yet that influence cannot be depended upon, for now that he has won the election he no longer really needs those billionaires’ support. And he is offering them tax cuts and deregulation which they may believe will neutralise any damage to their global businesses from the tariff policy.
There is far less clarity about how Trump’s new freedoms will affect his foreign policy. If he carries out his promise to purge what he sees as the “deep state” of the intelligence services, the military and the State Department, then quite a considerable period of disruption can be expected, since such purges and restaffing will take a long time. For that reason, he might not do everything he has threatened.
Undoubtedly, the man who will have been most devastated by the election news is President Volodymr Zelenskyy of Ukraine, who deserves all our sympathy after everything that he and his nation have gone through since Russia’s brutal invasion in 2022.
As he has shown, however, he is hugely resilient: he will be thinking today that he still stands a chance of dissuading Trump from withdrawing American support, but most of all that he needs to persuade European governments to step into the gap. If they really want to defend their own security and to preserve NATO, that is exactly what they will have to do.
Addendum: [The one piece of news on November 6th that may have heartened him was the collapse of the coalition government in Germany. This means he will no longer have to wait until September 2025 for a new government to be elected in Europe’s most powerful country, one that would likely bring to power a man who has shown much greater courage and determination about defending Ukraine’s and Europe’s security: Friedrich Merz, leader of the Christian Democratic Union, which is currently well ahead in opinion polls — although what sort of coalition he will be able to assemble remains to be seen. In today’s papers a date of March is forecast for the election, but it could happen sooner than that.]